Vanessa sex channel wants to be bilingual

Vanessa, the French-language pay TV channel launched by Anne-Marie Losique in 2010, is having trouble getting television distribution services to add an English-language counterpart to their systems. Cable and satellite services, it says, are reluctant to devote a second channel as more and more specialty services (particularly those in high definition) are taking up a finite space on their networks.

Its solution, as detailed in an application to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission that was published on Thursday, is to turn its existing channel into a bilingual one, with all programming in one language subtitled in the other.

Jokes about how much translation of pornography is required would naturally go here. The channel only offers porn between 11pm and 6am, with the rest of the day devoted to programming about sexuality. (Or, you know, so I’m told.)

A bilingual license isn’t unprecedented. Pelmorex has one for The Weather Network/MétéoMédia, and Corus and Astral share one for Teletoon/Télétoon, but those involve one actual channel for each language. CPAC also has two channels to serve each language. One example of a single specialty channel that offers programming in both languages is IDNR-TV, the natural resources channel, which has low distribution.

It took three years for Vanessa to launch in French, and the channel had only 6,790 subscribers in 2011, according to data submitted to the CRTC. Even though it’s among the top 10 in terms of revenue per subscriber at $45 a year or $3.75 a month (Bell and Videotron charge about $15 a month for the channel), its total subscription revenue was $305,538 in 2011, or about 1% that of the Weather Network or 0.2% that of TSN. With $700,000 in total revenue but $2.1 million in total expenses in 2011, the service lost more than twice what it made, making it one of the worst performing specialty channels in Canada.

5 thoughts on “Vanessa sex channel wants to be bilingual”

The channel would likely have a much higher take up rate if the price was a little more reasonable. With their $45 take per user, they are only seeing 3 months average retention, which is terrible! You cannot build a brand or build awareness when people are actively disconnecting your service in a short period of time.

This could actually be a channel that could benefit from having a second language track for all shows, so that they can be shown in english and french at the same time. After all, moaning is bilingual, isn’t it?